Graph neural network-based biomedical misinformation detection with semantic consistency analysis

Abstract

Conventional misinformation detection approaches primarily rely on textual features and deep learning (DL) classifiers, which often fail to capture complex relationships among biomedical entities and the underlying scientific context of health claims. To address this limitation, this study proposes a graph neural network (GNN)-based biomedical misinformation detection framework that integrates knowledge graph propagation with semantic consistency verification. Initially, key biomedical entities such as diseases, treatments, and biological processes are extracted and mapped into a structured biomedical knowledge graph (BKG) to represent semantic relationships. A graph attention network (GAT) is then employed to model relational dependencies and propagate contextual information across connected entities, enabling the detection of hidden inconsistencies in biomedical claims. The proposed model is evaluated using benchmark biomedical misinformation datasets, including Reliable COVID-19 News Dataset, 2021 (ReCOVery), COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Dataset, 2020 (CoAID), and 2018–2020 biomedical health news corpus (HealthStory). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves an average detection accuracy of 96.3%, outperforming conventional long short-term memory (LSTM), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and transformer-based models in terms of precision, recall, and F1-score. The findings highlight that integrating structured biomedical knowledge with graph-based reasoning significantly enhances the reliability and interpretability of misinformation detection systems.